Understanding current events can be difficult. For instance, our statehouse Republicans, like their colleagues throughout the country, clearly want to preserve my freedom to die of some chronic disease. Thus they want to see the Affordable Care Act repealed before it goes into full effect.

But Republicans in our House of Representatives couldn’t content themselves with a resolution in favor of more death and suffering among the economically challenged. No, they had to pass a resolution calling for a national convention to propose a constitutional amendment to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

One GOP argument against the law is that it’s unconstitutional. Since courts will act on that, why would Republicans think an amendment was necessary? To make it double-dog super-duper unconstitutional? Who knows?

But the sponsor of the resolution, Rep. David Balmer of Centennial, said it was about saving jobs that Colorado would lose under the 2010 federal Affordable Care Act. Good to see somebody cares about keeping Colorado’s embalmers and gravediggers at work. Or maybe they just want the federal constitution to be as cluttered and incomprehensible as our state constitution.

Even as it is, though, the federal constitution must be difficult to understand because Rep. Michele Bachmann, back when she was in the running, promised that, if elected, “I will repeal Obamacare.”

Under our federal constitution with its separation of powers, presidents don’t get to repeal or enact laws. That’s a legislative function performed by Congress. You’d think Bachmann might have read up about the job before she decided to apply for it.

And then there’s another applicant, Newt Gingrich, who recently threw some raw meat to the mob with a few snarls at “the elite media.” I’ll grant that there are some elite media in this country. For instance, in 2005 The Wall Street Journal bragged to potential advertisers that its readers “have an average household income of $234,000 and average nearly $2.1 million in net worth.”

In other words, these “affluent individual consumers” are part of the American elite, yet I never hear Republicans criticizing The Wall Street Journal as part of the “elite media.”

Instead, Gingrich used the term for CNN, whose reporter asked the question, or ABC, which aired the interview with a former Mrs. Gingrich. Or maybe it was both. But how the networks of Larry King and “Desperate Housewives” can be “elitist” is beyond me. Both want high ratings and that means aiming at the lowest common denominator. Networks that vie to bring us the latest in celebrity rehab are not elite media.

And of course, all these elite media cover up scandals involving Democrats. So it must be mental telepathy that told me about Anthony Weiner, John Edwards, William Jefferson and Elliot Spitzer.

Of course, if you forsake the elites and aim at the great general public, as most broadcasters and newspapers do, then you can run afoul of another Republican, Sarah Palin, who’ll bad-mouth you for being part of the “Lame Stream Media,” a take-off on “mainstream media.” Now it would seem to me that “mainstream” is by definition something for most Americans, not just the elite.

Now I have to confess that I long aspired to join “the media elite” and enjoy the money and influence of a George Will or Rush Limbaugh. But like many youthful ambitions, it never happened and probably won’t. But I have a request: The next time somebody wants to call me part of the elite, please send enough money to make it true.

Freelance columnist Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.